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John Tweedy: Atticus Finch and the art of politics

By John Tweedy

Posted:
02/27/2016 07:35:35 PM MST

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the film version of "To Kill a Mockingbird." (/ Universal)

Today I'm thinking about politics, and Harper Lee.

Ms. Lee, who died last week, left us two books: the one we all know from junior high, and the one published just last year. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is of course the better novel. But "Go Set a Watchman," (the project she originally abandoned in the late 1950s, on her editor's advice) is more honest, more disturbing, and more relevant to the times we're in.

They're both about Atticus Finch. In "Mockingbird," he's a lone (and mythic) legal crusader who refuses to compromise his principles in defending a black man falsely accused of rape. In this inspiring and comforting narrative, a courageous individual makes social change by standing up for his beliefs, even at a social cost to himself. In "Watchman," Atticus attends White Citizens' Council meetings and makes racist remarks about the NAACP. He navigates his flawed community from day to day, saying things he doesn't really believe - and yet doesn't quite disbelieve either -- in order to maintain influence, going along to get along, struggling to keep sight of his values in changing times. In "Mockingbird," the narrator admires Atticus from her daughterly perch.

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In "Watchman," he horrifies and revolts her.

Many of us have the same reaction, especially when it comes to our public figures. We revere one Atticus and condemn the other. A person who acts consistently and from core beliefs is our idea of a good leader. We despise the person who plays both sides against the middle, whose beliefs seem to shift to suit the needs of the moment, who won't adopt an idea until it's expedient to do so.

And yet Scout realizes in the course of "Watchman" that Atticus I is the same person as Atticus II, and that there is more than one way to change the world. And though we keep having to re-learn it, this is manifestly true. Abraham Lincoln was despised by pre-Civil War Abolitionists as terribly weak on the question of slavery. If digital video and Youtube had existed back then, his opponents could have whipped up a devastating split-edit showing him contradicting himself endlessly on the issue, proving that he was just a flat-out liar. And yet, when the pivotal time for abolition came, Lincoln drew on his mastery of those same slippery, backroom-dealing, conniving tactics to achieve its passage (Spielberg's "Lincoln" illustrates that moment beautifully).

When the Civil Rights movement brought the country to the tipping point, Lyndon Johnson used his ugly tools of intimidation, horse-trading, and guile to pass the Voting Rights Act. This landmark legislation dwarfs anything Barack Obama has done, or will ever do. I admire Obama both personally and politically, but his negotiating skills seem limited to calling his opponents on the phone and asking nicely. If he were better at the greasy game, the Affordable Care Act would have been stronger AND would have passed with Republican votes.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has guided the Supreme Court to legalization of marriage equality not by strident confrontation, but by climbing up a long, twisting road of contradictory cases, by biding her time until the LGBTQ struggle had brought the country to a new majority consensus - and by spending a lot of New Year's Eves with Justice Scalia.

What do these examples teach? That moments of social change arrive through sustained efforts by committed individuals, no question. But from the perspective of governance, they come in sudden bursts of opportunity. And when the river reaches the rapids, it helps to know how to paddle on both sides of the canoe. Or, as Lincoln said to the radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, what good is it to follow a compass pointing true north when what you have to navigate is a swamp?

John Tweedy is an attorney/mediator and documentary filmmaker with Landlocked Films in Boulder.

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